What it doesn't seem to mention is how often Stradivarius violins have failed in direct side by side comparisons with modern instruments, when listened to by top notch violinists in double blind tests. The study and article are proceeding on the (actually rather dubious) assumption that, yes, Stradivarius violins are ALWAYS better and that there's actually some "secret" about them.
If you delve a little further and deeper into the article, you'll find that the lead scientist was inspired to undertake the study by a meeting with the notorious Professor Nagyvary, who is a Stradivarius obsessive who has been promoting one "secret" to the sound of these instruments after another. For a while Nagyvary believed that there was urine in the varnish Stradivarius used, so he put plastic buckets in the mens room at Texas A&M University, where he taught, so that students could pee into the buckets and contribute to his "research" that way.
Later, Nagyvary was convinced that it was chitin (the substance that makes up insect exoskeletons) in the varnish that gave them their sound, so he was boiling crickets and Junebugs up in vats and using the resulting glop to coat violins in the white that he'd purchased. (Nagyvary himself has never made a violin, though he'll tell you otherwise.)
Every five or ten years or so Nagyvary "discovers" yet another "secret" to the sound of Stradivarius. The logs floating in seawater is another one of the theories he's advanced, and this latest study seems to have been inspired by that.
Here's the true "secret" to the "mysterious" excellence of Stradivarius violins: Stradivarius himself was an excellent craftsman who made superb instruments. What's more, he lived into his 90's, and was an active builder making great violins for many decades.
So there are a lot of existing Strad violins, cellos and even a couple of guitars still floating around. They're really well-made.
But the idea of Strads as having this mythical level of perfection never achieved before or since is much more a creation of market forces than anything else. Yes, they're great violins. But there's no secret to it. They were very well-made, and a lot of them were built and - more importantly - preserved for future generations.
For a while I got into turn-of-the-20th Century parlor guitars: Martins, Washburns, Lyon & Healys, Brunos, and what have you. When I delved into the history of these instruments, something that I found interesting was that Lyon & Healy, under its own brand name and others like Washburn, probably made ten guitars for every one that Martin made. Yet if you look at what's out there on the market these days, there are probably ten 1890's Martins for every Lyon & Healy or Washburn from the same era.
The reason is that Martin was a name that even non-musicians knew meant excellent quality, so when a non-guitarist inherited Grandpa's old Martin, it got taken care and handed down, mostly on the assumption that it must be very, very valuable.
Lyon & Healy and Washburn guitars? Not so much: "Oh, that old thing. Little Jimmy is interested in music; let's let him play on it."
The same thing happened to the many other violins that were made at the same time as the Strads: they didn't have the same cachet, so they weren't treasured. As a result, they haven't survived the passage of time in the same way.
Anyway, over the decades Nagyvary has managed to generate one news article after another about whatever "secret to the Stradivarius sound" he's discovered THIS time, and in this case he indirectly managed to generate yet another one.
Just as many people choose to believe that there's a Loch Ness Monster lurking in the deeps of that tectonic rift lake, and don't want to hear any of the science that proves otherwise, there's a resistance by most folks to the idea that something as legendary as Stradivarius violins aren't actually as unique as we want to believe.
So that study proceeded on a flawed premise, namely that those violins are inexplicably unique. They're not. They're great instruments, but there's no mystery to it.
Wade Hampton Miller
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